I have never met such exhaustion until I came to college. Staying up to the early hours to wake up for an 8 am is not an easy task when it seems like during the day the To-Do list is never ending. The weekend comes and you can only imagine there is barely any rest there. Every morning I wake up to internally yell at myself for why my insomnia took over and why I didn’t just go to bed earlier…but would I feel any different? Does an extra hour of sleep really have an effect on the body?

We live in a society where sleep has now become some sort of luxury. If we have other things we need to do, we can just cut back on some sleep. Then wake up and have three cups of coffee. In a study done by the British Broadcast Channel News Network, they saw a connection between decrease hours of sleep and increase of rates of diabetes and obesity.

To run the study, they asked for seven volunteers that normally sleep between six and nine hours a night. The volunteers were randomly assigned to two groups. One group slept for six and a half hours a night and the other group was asked to sleep one hour more a night, seven and a half hours. At the end of the week of doing the same procedure every night, the researchers took blood tests of the volunteers and asked them to switch sleeping patterns.

Sleep is essential in order to maintain long-term memory. While we are asleep, the brains main focus is to move short-term memory to long-term memory storage. If we do not get a good amount of sleep, these memories will be lost. Unfortunately you cannot get these memories back just by sleeping extra on the weekend, they need to be stored within 24 hours.

Back to the study taking place, after the second week of the trials the scientists noticed the mental agility skills were not as good as the group with more sleep. But when it came to the blood tests of the volunteers, which are where the interesting information came out. The researches noticed that when the volunteers cut back on an hour of sleep, genes that are associated with processes like immune response and response to stress became more active. They also saw increases in the activity of genes associated with diabetes and risk of cancer. There was a reverse effect with the volunteers that got the extra hour of sleep. They concluded that losing an hour of sleep night actually puts people more at risk for diabetes and other heart diseases.

This is a clear demonstration that sleep does us good! So feel free, go crawl in bed, our health is the most important thing we have anyways, right?

Sources:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24444634